Tag: andrea olsen

when I was tired, exhausted and unable to go forward at Middlebury, Andrea Olsen always reminded me of bones. “Bones?!” If you are raising your right eyebrow and lowering your left one, you are making exactly the face I made four years ago when she told me “Bones.” for the first time.

Bones.

Today, as I witnessed three completely separate worlds coming together in a rehearsal room with windows covered with bamboos in the 20th arrondissement in Paris, I reminded myself: “Bones”. It takes bones, all 206 of them, to invest all of myself in a project beyond reason. To involve five other people – that’s 5×206 = 1,030 bones – in a utopia beyond logic. And yet, as I stood amidst a pile of yarn and newspapers in front of three performers knitting and discussing in German, English and French all mixed at the same time, it felt like a dream coming true. Most assuredly, in the least sequential and most scattered way I could have ever imagined. But a dream becoming reality.

Because I have chosen to invest in human encounters, in bodies touching each other, reaching across space and barriers (intellectual and physical ones), in voices harmonizing together, in yarn becoming scarves, in words on pages being read aloud and acquiring a voice in space and time. In people wrapping their heads and bodies around the issues they see in the way the world turns nowadays. So much work lies ahead, and today was the smallest of steps, but I know I’m in good company – and I feel lucky for that.